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Metrolinx recommends Sheppard LRT building start in 2014

Finch would follow in 2015. Construction would take about four years on each project.

By Tess KalinowskiTransportation Reporter

Tues., April 24, 2012

Despite 16 months of flailing on the transit file, all four of Toronto’s new provincially funded light rail lines will open within the original timeframe of 2020.

Only the hotly contested Sheppard LRT will be completed much later than it would have been before Mayor Rob Ford came to office and stalled all plans for street-level transit expansion.

Now, instead of the Sheppard LRT opening in 2014 as originally scheduled, work will only begin that year. The Finch LRT is scheduled to break ground in 2015. Both projects are expected to take about four years to complete.

On Wednesday, the Metrolinx board is expected to approve a return to the plan Metrolinx agreed to under former Toronto mayor David Miller, holding the province to its promise to respect the direction of city council, despite the mayor’s opposition.

“We would prefer there is alignment between the mayor, the TTC and council moving forward,” said Metrolinx CEO Bruce McCuaig.

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However, he said, “We need to work with the official position of the city and that position came forward in February and March.”

That’s when Ford lost control of the transit file, failing to convince a majority of councillors that he had a viable plan to fund a subway expansion on Sheppard or that the Eglinton LRT east of Laird Ave. should run underground. Instead, council voted to put the east end of Eglinton above ground, although the centre 11 kilometres will remain tunneled, and to use the money saved to help build LRT on Finch and Sheppard.

“We’ve lost some time with the debate that has gone on with the City of Toronto,” said McCuaig. Cost escalations can be accommodated in the province’s $8.4 billion budget, he said.

“Going back to the original plan reduces, if not eliminates, sunk and delay costs,” he said.

But it won’t be clear what penalties the protracted transit debate has incurred until Metrolinx goes back to Bombardier to negotiate over the delay on returning to the city’s original order of 182 new light-rail vehicles, which will run on the Sheppard, Finch, Eglinton and SRT lines.

That negotiation won’t happen until the provincial cabinet also approves a return to the LRT plan and details are worked out with the city.

TTC chair Karen Stintz said she was pleased by the Metrolinx plan, saying the province is moving as quickly as possible. It will begin next year to build a Scarborough storage facility for the LRVs that will run on Sheppard and the SRT. That facility will also include a test track. Until it’s completed in 2016, there is nowhere to store or maintain the new, longer LRVs.

“It reflects the will of council. It’s moving quickly on council’s approved plan. It will bring transit to areas that need it the most,” Stintz said of Metrolinx’s actions.

The mayor has committed to continuing his campaign for subways into the 2014 municipal election. But by then the province expects to have contracted the work on Sheppard. To cancel it would probably incur heavy financial penalties.

Meantime, work has already begun on Eglinton, where giant tunnel-boring machines are expected to be in motion by fall on digging for the $6.5 billion line, the central portion of which is still being built below the street. That line will be in service in 2020.

Conversion of the Scarborough RT to LRT will begin in 2014 also, to open in 2019. Although Metrolinx hopes to begin the work on the northeast end of the SRT, the existing line will remain in service until after the Pan Am Games in 2015. At that point it will be shut down and commuters will be relegated to buses until it is complete.

Although the TTC will operate the new lines, the projects will be designed and built by Infrastructure Ontario, which allows for more “certainty” they will come in on-time and on-budget, said McCuaig.

The TTC will approve most of the design details to ensure they are integrated with the rest of the transit system.

That integration is particularly crucial at three inter-modal hubs where subways and LRTs meet — Eglinton, Eglinton West and Kennedy stations.

City Councillor Maria Augimeri said she was disappointed that her transit-starved constituents along Finch will have to wait until 2015 to see shovels.

“I was hoping for an 11th hour reprieve, hanging my hat on the issue that Sheppard was such a political hot potato that the province and its agencies would lay off until the next election, but that’s not to be,” she said.

Augimeri is hopeful that the intersection of Keele and Finch, where the Spadina subway extension and the LRT line will intersect, will be designed with particular care.

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